Applications for Colorado big-game limited hunting licenses came in so fast Monday and Tuesday that the computer and credit-card processing systems crashed.

The deadline to apply for those licenses was Tuesday. Colorado Parks and Wildlife said high volume caused a link for online applications to crash for about three hours Monday night.

Continued high volume Tuesday morning left an estimated 2,000 hunters unable to have their application fees processed by credit card from 4:15 a.m. until 8:15 a.m. The system was operating normally later Tuesday.

“Apparently there was just too much traffic,” Parks and Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton said. “We encourage people to apply early, but so many of them wait until the last day.”

Hampton said the agency won’t know for a few more weeks exactly how many applications were made, so they can’t yet judge whether a call to boycott hunting in Colorado proved statistically significant.

“It’s completely impossible to speculate on that,” he said. “It just means that we’re having high volume, which is great.”

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